


I'm going to make this place your home

by orphan_account



Series: Haven [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen, I'll get there eventually, M/M, Still neither hide nor hair of the alpha pack, Though not in this fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-14
Updated: 2012-11-14
Packaged: 2017-11-18 16:24:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/563025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He was tired of letting things go.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'm going to make this place your home

**Author's Note:**

> I heard Phillip Phillips's song _Home_ , and couldn't get the idea of Stiles and Allison (Lydia was as much of a surprise to me as she was to Stiles) working together to rebuild the Hale house. 
> 
> I realize that houses tend to take longer to put together, but if it's a project they do during the day, every day, for most of a summer, I think it could actually happen.

The ceiling wasn’t going to get any more interesting. It was the same as it had been forty years ago, when the house was first built. Three different people had slept and played and done homework under this ceiling, and it was still eggshell white. The walls were a different story. Five times they had been repainted, though the room’s current occupant knew only of the two most recent facades. Seventeen years ago, a young couple had painted the walls of this room a warm butter yellow and filled it with a crib and changing table and tiny clothes and hopes and dreams for the future of the little life growing safely inside the wife’s still mostly-flat stomach. Three years ago, the little life which had grown into an uncertain youth painted the room a pale blue.  
  
Through it all, the walls and the ceiling had stayed strong and proud.  
  
Elsewhere, there was another room. It had been there since the mid-nineteen hundreds, and sheltered several generations from rain, from family feuds, from the outside world. Today, the walls were charred and crumbling, the ceiling more like a gateway to the elements.  
  
Laying on his bed, his arms under his pillow, Stiles stared up at his unchanging ceiling and felt his lips fall into a stubborn line. He was tired of letting things go. He got up and grabbed his keys and his wallet from the little bedside table, and headed for the stairs, tromping down them without thought to the noise of his heavy footfalls. No one else was around to care.  
  
After hopping into the jeep, he drove down familiar yet atypical roads, making his way to a house he hadn’t thought he would ever want to step foot in again. He rang the doorbell of the imposing home and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his cargo shorts.  
  
He supposed he might worry about running into Scott here, but then, he had a feeling he knew exactly where his best friend was, and it wasn’t this house. No, Scott would be with Isaac Lahey. They might be at the vet’s. They might be at the lacrosse field. They might be at the McCall’s. They might be anywhere, since Derek and Peter had left Beacon Hills to seek out old allies, but they wouldn’t be here.  
  
The door opened, and Allison stared at him, surprise and confusion tightening the skin around her wide brown eyes. That was to be expected. What wasn’t so expected was the sight of her hair, once long and wavy, like a babbling brook, now short and straight. It made Stiles want to run his hand over his own hair, because he could only think of one reason for Allison to have shorn off all of that beautiful dark hair she had been so proud of.  
  
Grief and regret made people do strange things.  
  
“Hey,” Stiles said at last, since it didn’t seem like Allison would break the silence any time soon.  
  
“Hey.” Her voice was quiet and cautious, and it strengthened his resolve. Allison should never feel uncertain. She was like Gwyn, from _Princess of Thieves_ , or Black Widow. Perhaps that was better, since Natasha Romanov had a dark past. That was cool, though. He would just have to be her Agent Coulson.  
  
“So, I figure we could all hide away in our rooms this summer, wallowing in our own bad decisions, or we could do something about them.”  
  
She blinked. “What did you have in mind?”  
  
“You and I, we’re really good at making messes. So, why not try something different? Do you want to make a difference, Allison? Do you want to make up for what you did?” He wasn’t about to sugar coat this. That wasn’t what Allison needed. What she needed was some way to find absolution, and for someone to keep her from hiding away from the world. Since it looked like no one else was brave enough, and since he had nothing better to do, he figured he was the man for the job.  
  
He waited, letting her come to grips with his blunt words. Eventually, she stood a little straighter, a little stronger. “Yes.”  
  
…  
  
Lydia was a surprise, but not an unpleasant one. After the school year ended, Jackson had left Beacon Hills, going to stay with his mother’s sister in Boston. So far as Stiles knew, they were still together, but that didn’t stop Lydia from feeling alone. He supposed that was as good of a reason for her to stand there in the clearing, staring up at the facsimile of a house, her hand in Allison’s. Or maybe she had other reasons, and didn’t feel like sharing. Who was he to say? They’d withheld information from her for the better part of a year. She was allowed to play things close to the chest.  
  
She also had a right to demand information, which she exercised readily. “How are we paying for this?”  
  
Stiles ran a hand down the back of his neck, not embarrassed necessarily, but not accustomed to sharing personal information, the kind that really mattered, with anyone other than Scott - and even he had no idea about this. “I’ve, um, I’ve got it covered. My grandparents send me a check every month. A lot of it gets put in a college fund, but the rest of it...” He’d tried to give it to his dad, in the beginning. It wasn’t actually something he wanted. Taking money from his mother’s parents because they felt guilty over never visiting their only grandchild left a sour feeling in his gut. They used to visit several times a year. They’d lavished him with gifts and attention, then, delighting in how much he looked and acted like their daughter. After the car accident, after Stiles lived and their baby girl didn’t... they stopped coming, and in their place were the checks.  
  
“And you really think it’s going to be enough?” Lydia asked, not one to be deterred.  
  
“I really do.”  
  
They started by making blueprints, taking note of the odd symbol on the door as they go. Lydia sketched it on a separate sheet of wax paper, and they each agreed to look into it further in their time away.  
  
The house must have been magnificent, once upon a time. Stiles stared around what used to be the kitchen, imagining wild children with dark hair and light eyes running in and out, stealing cookies and making messes. He promised whoever listened to the back-and-forth magpie nuances of his thoughts that he would make that vision a reality again.  
  
Getting permission from the county to bulldoze the house took some time, but that was fine. They needed to gather supplies and make plans, anyway. After Lydia made a call, Mr. Whittemore helped to smooth things along. Stiles didn’t ask for the details, and she didn’t give them. This project was going a ways to helping them become friends, but there were still too many things unsaid between them, and too many years of unreturned feelings to overcome.  
  
Like everything else these days, they were a work in progress.  
  
…  
  
When they started out, none of them had a clue what they were doing. They spent a long time looking how-to videos up on youtube, went through several first-aid kits, and hours of frustration. But things got better, and they grew closer. As the frame of the house developed, their friendship gained one, as well. They fortified their bonds while they insulated and plastered the walls. As they tried to figure out the plumbing and electricity, they created inside jokes and incidents they could laugh about later, over coffee or pizza and the supernatural research they never allowed to crop up in discussion while they worked.  
  
It was Allison who discovered the significance of the triskelion that would no longer mar the front door. They were eating pigs in a blanket and apple turnovers in the Stilinski kitchen, when she set her laptop on the island.  
  
Stiles stuffed the second half of his bundled little piggie in his mouth and leaned down to read, chewing furiously. He barely remembered to swallow in order to avoid Lydia’s disapproving glare before he bit out, “A whole _pack_ of alphas? Seriously? No wonder Derek and Peter are calling in the cavalry.”  
  
“Trying to anyway,” Allison amended. “Who knows if anyone will actually agree?”  
  
And wasn’t that just the absolute hell of it? Why would anyone want to ally with a pack that was so dysfunctional and scattered? Especially if the people who came calling were the sterling examples of wolflihood that Derek and Peter surely were.  
  
Lydia gazed stoically at the screen from where she stood beside Stiles. “I’ll add training time to our schedule. It might delay the painting a little, but we’ve been ahead for weeks now.”  
  
“Training? In what?”  
  
She glanced at Stiles. “Whatever we can find.”  
  
They found quite a bit.  
  
Stiles told the girls about his first foray into magic, and they paid a visit to Dr. Deaton on one of the days Scott had off. He agreed to teach Stiles and Lydia, but apologetically informed Allison that she simply didn’t have the same spark. Her, the veterinarian taught about the different kinds of wolfsbane - to an extent her own family never could. Stiles and Lydia learned to take strength from the world around them, and to use herbs and other plants along with their imaginations to protect themselves and those they loved. The same day that the three of them finished painting the living room, the last room in the house, a mossy green, Stiles and Lydia got their right shoulders tattooed with the Nebula triskelion, marking themselves as friends of the Hale pack.  
  
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Dr. Deaton cautioned. “Because once you take this mark, you will be tied to the Hale pack for life.”  
  
“Jackson may have left to sort things out, but he’ll be back,” Lydia told him, looking at once small and fragile and determined and brave in her electric blue tank top and shorts and perched on the examination table. “I’m not going anywhere.”  
  
“Mr. Stilinski?”  
  
“I couldn’t stay away from all of this if I wanted to.” And there were times, he didn’t say, when he had really, really wanted to.  
  
“Very well.”  
  
Putting the hinges on all of the doors and screwing in the doorknobs the next day was a little uncomfortable, but the two of them felt the pain of it and were reminded of exactly what it meant: their connection to the land and to the pack, their strength and their knowledge, the friendship they’d forged through sweat and stubbed toes and splinters and black ink. Allison watched the two of them and squashed down the faint stirrings of jealousy. She wasn’t a mystic or a healer. She was, in her heart of hearts, a hunter.  
  
At the end of the day, when the trees cast long shadows on the house, and they piled the last of their supplies into Allison’s truck, they looked up at the place they made together, and Stiles and Lydia put their hands on Allison’s back. The house was whole now, because of them, because of what they had done. The house was whole, and so were they.  
  
With two weeks left of summer, they took a break from all things Hale. They left the house to air out and take in the scents of earth and leaves and fresh air, relaxing during the day and spending time with what was left of their own families at night.  
  
…  
  
On the last night of summer, a nearly inaudible thud drew Stiles away from the comic book he had been reading, sprawled out on his bed with his neck bent over the pages. Derek Hale looked at him, his eyes so incredibly open and raw. Stiles sat up and looked back, telling himself to be patient.  
  
“Why?” he breathed finally, the word tiny and helpless in a way that Derek’s words simply shouldn’t be.  
  
“Because I know what it’s like to feel like all you ever do is make things worse, and like you don’t deserve something good. Because you aren’t as alone as you think. Because you needed it, but we needed it, too.” Stiles glanced away, his eyes catching on the old books now lining his shelves. “Did you find what you were looking for?”  
  
When he turned back, Derek’s eyebrows were drawn, though in something much softer than anger or worry. More than anything, it looked like wonder. He’d seen that expression on Derek’s face once before, after keeping him alive for over two hours in the high school pool. “Not while I was gone.”  
  
“But you have now?” He never heard him confirm it out loud, but judging by the warm press of lips against his, the gentle scrape of stubble against his cheeks, the security of arms around his waist, Stiles guessed the answer must have been some approximation of, ‘Yes.’  
  
…  
  
“Dude, why do you smell like Derek?” If Stiles were feeling childish, he would have simply ignored Scott, who really had no room to sound so judgmental, since Isaac had his arm slung so casually over his shoulder.  
  
Instead, Stiles grabbed his backpack out of the passenger seat of the jeep and called out as he walked toward Allison and Lydia, “He came home last night.”  
  
Scott’s face scrunched up, and he shook his head, bewildered at his friend’s response, as well as the arm Allison looped through Stiles’s own, and the way Lydia handed Stiles her books. “Yeah,” they’d known all summer that Derek and Peter would come back last night but... “Stiles, what did you _do?”_  
  
Instead of answering, Stiles grinned and told Scott, “I’ll see you in class, buddy.”  
  
Together, the hunter, the healer, and the mystic walked into the school.  
  
A few miles away, a young man lay upon a newly placed wooden floor and stared up at a ceiling which looked almost exactly like the one he had stared up at for sixteen years, and for the first time since it was all burned away, he felt like he was home.


End file.
